Update:
This essay is really sort of outdated. Nevertheless I has not been keeping track on this native driver. One good approach to get things work is to use a more "wrapped" distro, where ndiswrapper + windows driver works. And then "upgrade" it into the original distro you desired by changing the repository settings or whatever. For those who desire Ubuntu, I recommend Linux Mint.
I used to try getting rtl8187b wireless card work on ubuntu by using ndiswrapper,everything seemed fine with this method except that it WASN't ACTURALLY WORKING. What happened was, iwconfig said that there's a wlan0,iwlist scan did find several signal around -- but they never change.It seems that the wireless card only worked when the machine started up, when it discovered something by then and kept returning it to me later. Things were the same when I use the graphic interface, of course.
I turned to #ubuntu@irc.ubuntu.org for help and met Word1983. He gave me a page from google, from which I traced to this
modified driver for rtl8187b.
Here're several steps to drive rtl8187b up with this driver:
1 downland
the driver.
2 extract it to a folder.Since we will keep this folder,you'd better choose a good place for it.
tar xzvf rtl8187b-modified-dist.tar.gz -C GoooPlace/
cd GoodPlace
3 run the script makedrv with sudo.Don't panic on those compiler warnings,as long as you don't see anything like "error", the driver might not have been nice coded, but it will work.
sudo ./makedrv
4 run the other script wlan0up with sudo
sudo ./wlan0up
If nothing went wrong, you should find a wlanX in the result of iwconfig,in case you may have tried to get the rtl8187b wireless card worked, X varies from 0 to ?.
iwconfig
Then you may go
iwlist scan
The card will detect signals surrounded then.Which means that it started working properly.
PS:You need to run sudo wlan0up everytime you need wireless.You may want to make a shortcut for it on your desktop or home folder.